The c-Jun N-terminal kinases (JNKs) are members of mitogen-activated protein kinase family along with p38 and extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERKs). Three distinct genes (jnk1, jnk2 and jnk3) encoding 10 splice variants have been identified (Y. T. Ip and R. J. Davis, Curr. Opin. Cell Biol. (1998) 10:205-19). JNK1 and JNK2 are expressed in a wide variety of tissues, whereas JNK3 is mainly expressed in neurons, and to a lesser extent in heart and testes (D. D. Yang et al., Nature (1997) 389:865-70). Members of JNK family are activated by pro-inflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β), as well as environmental stresses. The activation of JNKs is mediated by its upstream kinases, MKK4 and MKK7, via dual phosphorylation of Thr-183 and Tyr-185 (B. Derijard et al., Cell (1994) 76:1025-37). It has been shown that MKK4 and MMK7 can be activated by the diverse upstream kinases, including MEKK1 and MEKK4, depending upon the external stimuli and cellular context (D. Boyle et al., Arthritis Rheum (2003) 48:2450-24). The specificity of JNK signaling is achieved by forming a JNK-specific signaling complex containing multiple components of the kinase cascade using scaffold proteins called JNK-interacting proteins (J. Yasuda et al., Mol. Cell. Biol. (1999) 19:7245-54). JNKs have been shown to play important roles in inflammation, T cell functions, apoptosis and cellular survival by phosphorylating specific substrates, including transcription factors such as c-Jun, the component of activator protein-1 (AP1) family, and ATF2, as well as non-transcription factors such as IRS-1 and Bcl-2 (A. M. Manning and R. J. Davis, Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. (2003) 2:554-65). Over-activation of JNK is believed to be an important mechanism in autoimmune, inflammatory, metabolic, neurological diseases as well as cancer and pain.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the joints. In addition to the joint swelling and pain caused by the inflammatory process, most RA patients ultimately develop debilitating joint damage and deformation. Several lines of compelling pharmacological and genetic evidence in cellular and animal models strongly suggest the relevance and importance of the activated JNK in the pathogenesis of RA. First, abnormal activation of JNK was detected in both human arthritic joints from RA patients (G. Schett et al., Arthritis Rheum (2000) 43:2501-12) and rodent arthritic joints from animal models of arthritis (Z. Han et al., J. Clin. Invest. (2001) 108:73-81). In addition, inhibition of JNK activation by selective JNK inhibitors blocked proinflammatory cytokines and MMP production in human synoviocytes, macrophages and lymphocytes (Z. Han et al., (2001) supra). Importantly, administration of the selective JNK inhibitors in rats with adjuvant arthritis (Z. Han et al., (2001) supra) or in mice with collagen-induced arthritis (P. Gaillard et al., J Med Chem. (2005) 14:4596-607) effectively protected joints from destruction and significantly reduced paw swelling by inhibiting cytokine and collagenase expression. Furthermore, JNK2 deficient mice were partially protected from joint destruction, but showed little effect on paw swelling and inflammation in the passive collagen-induced arthritis model. These studies indicate that JNK2 is functionally redundant with JNK1 in regard to their roles in matrix degradation, inflammation and paw swelling. Therefore, combined inhibition of both JNK1 and JNK2 activities is required for effective therapy for RA (Z. Han et al., Arthritis Rheum. (2002) 46:818-23).
Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of airways, characterized by the presence of a cellular inflammatory process and by bronchial hyper-responsiveness associated with structural changes of the airways (B. Bradley et al., J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. (1991) 88:661-74). This disorder has been shown to be driven by many cell types in the airways, including T lymphocytes, eosinophils, mast cells, neutrophils and epithelial cells (J. Bousquet et al., Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. (2000) 161:1720-45). JNKs have emerged as promising therapeutic targets for asthma based upon the recent proof-of-concept studies in the cellular and animal models of asthma using selective JNK inhibitors (K. Blease et al., Expert Opin. Emerg. Drugs (2003) 8:71-81). It was shown that JNK inhibitors significantly blocked RANTES production in activated human airway smooth cells (K. Kujime et al., J. Immunol. (2000) 164:3222-28). More importantly, the JNK inhibitors showed good efficacy in chronic rat and mouse models for their abilities to reduce cellular infiltration, inflammation, hyper-responsiveness, smooth muscle proliferation, and IgE production (P. Nath et al., Eur. J. Pharmacol. (2005) 506:273-83; P. Eynott et al., Br. J. Pharmacol. (2003) 140:1373-80). These observations suggest important roles of JNKs in the allergic inflammation, airway remodeling process associated with hyper-responsiveness. Therefore, blockade of JNK activity is expected to be beneficial for the treatment of asthma.
Type 2 diabetes is the most serious and prevalent metabolic disease characterized by insulin resistance and insulin secretion impairment as a result of chronic low-level inflammation and abnormal lipid metabolism associated with oxidative stress. It has been reported that JNK activity is abnormally elevated in various diabetic target tissues under obese and diabetic conditions (J. Hirosumi et al., Nature (2002) 420:333-36; H. Kaneto, Expert. Opin. Ther. Targets (2005) 9:581-92). Activation of the JNK pathway by pro-inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stresses negatively regulates insulin signaling via phosphorylation of insulin receptor substrate-1 (IRS-1) at Ser307, therefore contributes to insulin resistance and glucose tolerance (J. Hirosumi et al., Nature (2002) supra; Y. Lee et al., J. Biol. Chem. (2003) 278:2896-902; Y. Nakatani et al., J. Biol. Chem. (2004) 279:45803-09). Compelling genetic evidence came from elegant animal model studies using jnk−/− mice crossed with either genetic (ob/ob) obese mice or dietary obese mice. Loss of JNK1 (JNK−/−), but not JNK2 functions (jnk2−/−), protected obese mice from body gains, increased steady-state levels of blood glucose, and decreased plasma insulin levels (J. Hirosumi et al., Nature (2002) supra). Furthermore, the beneficial effects were observed in a genetic diabetic model (db/db mice) by administration of either a small molecule JNK inhibitor, CC105 (B. Bennett et al., Curr. Opin. Pharmacol. (2003) 3:420-25) or a JNK inhibitory peptide I(JIP) derived from the JNK binding domain of the JNK-interacting protein-1 (JIP-1) (H. Kaneto et al., Nat. Med. (2004) 10:1128-32), including significant lower blood glucose and higher plasma insulin levels. More interestingly, another recent report (A. Jaeschke et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. (2005) 102:6931-35) revealed that JNK2 plays an important role in type 1 diabetes caused by autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing β cells. Non-obese diabetic mice deficient in JNK2 expression showed reduced destructive insulitis and less disease progression to diabetes, probably due to biased polarization toward the Th2 phenotype. Taken together, these studies demonstrated the utility of JNK inhibitors in the treatment of obesity/type 2 diabetes.
Neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's (AD), Parkinson's (PD) and stroke are characterized by synaptic loss, neuronal atrophy and death. The JNK pathway leading to c-Jun activation has been shown to play a causal role in apoptosis of isolated primary embryonic neurons and multiple neuronal cell lines upon induction of a variety of stimuli (D. Bozyczko-Coyne et al., Curr. Drug Targets CNS Neurol. Disord. (2002) 1:31-49). Over-activation of JNK was observed in human brains from AD patients (J. Pei et al., J. Alzheimers Dis. (2001) 3:41-48) or rodent brain sections derived from animal models of neurodegenerative diseases (M. Saporito et al., J. Neurochem. (2000) 75:1200-08). For example, increased phospho-JNKs were detected in the post-mortem brains from the AD patients. Administration of JNK inhibitory peptide (JIP-1 peptide) in the rodent model of AD induced by β-amyloid peptide administration prevented the impairment of synaptic plasticity. In the animal models of PD (MPTP model), elevated phospho-MKK4 and phospho-JNKs were observed concomitantly with the neuronal cell death. Adenoviral gene transfer of JNK inhibitory peptide (JIP-1 peptide) into striatum of mice attenuated behavioral impairment by inhibiting MPTP-mediated JNK, c-Jun and caspase activation, therefore blocking neuronal cell death in the substantia nigra (X. Xia et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. (2001) 98:10433-38). In addition, in the animal model of ischemic stroke induced by glutamate excitotoxicity, mice deficient in JNK3, but not JNK1 or JNK2, were resistant to kainic acid (glutamate receptor agonist)-mediated seizure or neuronal death (D. D. Yang et al., Nature (1997) 389:865-70). These data suggest JNK3 was mainly responsible for glutamate excitotoxicity, an important component in ischemic conditions. Taken together, the data suggests that JNKs are an attractive target for multiple CNS diseases associated with neuronal cell death.
Uncontrolled cellular growth, proliferation and migration along with de-regulated angiogenesis lead to the formation of malignant tumors. The JNK signal transduction pathway may not act exclusively in apoptosis, sustained JNK activation leading to AP1 activation has recently been implicated to contribute to the cellular survival of specific cancer types such as glial tumors and BCL-ABL transformed B lymphoblasts (M. Antonyak et al., Oncogene (2002) 21:5038-46; P. Hess et al., Nat. Genet. (2002) 32:201-05). In the case of glial tumors, enhanced JNK/AP1 activity was seen in most of the primary brain tumor samples. For the transformed B lymphoblasts, BCL-ABL was shown to activate the JNK pathway which in turn up-regulated expression of anti-apoptotic bcl-2 gene. Interestingly, the multi-drug resistance and hyper-proliferation seen in treatment-refractory AML patients has been causally linked to the sustained JNK activity present in these AML samples (L. Cripe et al., Leukemia (2002) 16:799-812). Activation of JNK in leukemic cells resulted in induced expression of efflux pumps such as mdr1 and MRP1 responsible for multidrug resistance. Also, genes with a survival benefit in response to oxidative stress including glutathione-S-transferase π and γ-glutamyl cysteine synthase were also upregulated by the activated JNK pathway.
Accordingly, JNK modulators are useful in treating a variety of diseases and/or conditions.